unicode block-character graphic exporter for GIMP
Fans of ascii/ansi art may have noticed that unicode provides additional types of block-drawing characters, such as ▚ ▝ ▙. These let us draw 4 pixels in the space of one character, with two simultaneous colors.
Finding no editor for unicode art, i made this python plugin for gimp that exports an image to unicode block graphics, using the 16-color mIRC palette.
It is an entertaining challenge to draw pictures at low resolution with very few colors. It's fun to share them too. Make your own art and paste it to IRC channel ##ascii on the Freenode IRC network.
Linux: Copy unicolexport.py and unic99export.py to your ~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins/
Optional: Copy unc* helper scripts to /usr/local/bin and sudo chmod uog+x them
Optional: Copy the .gpl palette files to ~/.gimp-2.8/palettes/
Windows: I don't know (Install Linux?) :)
- Run GIMP, preferably from a terminal.
- Open the image to export in GIMP
- Resize image to something small, I prefer 144x58 (Optional: To edit the image in the irc palette, convert image to indexed color mode with the mIRC 16-Color Palette)
- Change image mode to RGB
- Select "Export as" and set filename extension to .unc
- Check the terminal for program output. It will notify you if lines are too long for IRC.
- Load the image into your irc client (e.g. in irssi /exec cat /path/to/file/filename.unc or to send the image to a channel, /exec -o cat /path/to/file/filename.unc)
An early pic i did of a BMW e21
The IRC 16-color palette gives us two greys plus black and white. Below is an example of picking your source material carefully, adjusting color ramps in GIMP to optimize the conversion to 4-color greyscale, then letting gimp do floyd-steinberg dithering when converting to indexed 16-color mode.
Famous people quotes are fun to do.
There is no substitute for editing every pixel by hand.
The above pictures were done with the standard mIRC 16-color palette. More recently, a very reasonable extended 99-color spec was proposed and is implemented by mIRC, Weechat and IRSSI so far. It is nice and good and Hexchat et.al. should be encouraged to adopt it. http://anti.teamidiot.de/static/nei/*/extended_mirc_color_proposal.html
99-colors poses special challenges - most color changes require the full 6 bytes, having more available colors means many color ramps requiring color changes per character, and no long runs of same color. Below image has a max line length of 481 Bytes after squishing.
99-colors gives enough greyscale for decent pics. However post-export editing of the .un9 textfile is necessary, to eliminate redundant color changes and shorten the lines. The below pic has maximum line length of 442 bytes.
Automated mapping to 99 or 16 color palettes never works as well as you'd wish. Best to do the mapping yourself using the color curves, then the supplied gimp color palettes.
